Nation's Best Am Dram, the talent contest where you have to perform King Lear,
arrives on Sky Arts 1 this Wednesday, writes Vicki Power.

Like most professional actors, Miriam Margolyes has in the past looked down on amateur dramatics as a bit of a joke, the province of the frustrated housewife labouring over a farce in a draughty village hall.

But the 71-year-old thespian had a change of heart after she joined the judging panel of Sky Arts’s new six-part reality show, Nation’s Best Am Dram. “I was surprised at the quality,” says Margolyes. “There are a lot of intelligent people doing am-dram, not just bored women looking for a bit on the side. I think we should eat our words.”

A talent contest to find the best amateur dramatics company from among the UK’s more than 3,500 groups, Nation’s Best Am Dram offers the winning troupe the chance to perform at the Lyric Theatre in London’s West End.

Margolyes is joined on the judging panel by theatre producer Bill Kenwright and critic Quentin Letts. Mentoring the finalists is an illustrious line-up that includes Dame Harriet Walter, Roger Allam, Martin Shaw, Richard Wilson and Niamh Cusack.

The judges watched hundreds of audition clips and found general performance problems, says Margolyes. “All the actors paused too much. You have to earn a pause; you can’t just take a pause when you want one,” she says. “Vocally, a lot of them lost energy at the end of the sentence, and some overacted.”

Related Articles

But there were jewels in the mix as well, and after heated and even “bad-tempered” exchanges, says Margolyes, the judges chose the eight best troupes. Each will receive one day of professional mentoring before performing an extended scene from either Chekhov or Ibsen, after which four groups will be eliminated. Next is the King Lear round, after which two more companies are sent home, and the remaining two finalists will battle for the prize with performances from Joe Orton’s obscure comedy The Erpingham Camp.

Among the standout troupes were Essex’s Heath Players, whose audition choice was a scene from The Merry Wives of Windsor performed as though they were characters from the reality show The Only Way Is Essex. Tiny Crossmichael Drama Club from Dumfries and Galloway, which operates from a tin shed, wowed the judges with their turn as the Rude Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed in dialect and filmed on a mobile phone.

Crossmichael’s performance, as with all non-professionals, comes after a hard day’s work: Wyllie McCulloch, 53, is a fishmonger, Jamie Young, a 19-year-old sheep farmer, and director Anne McIntyre, 46, a full-time carer for her disabled 13-year-old son, Shaun. “My son can be quite challenging,” she says. “The drama group is my saving grace.”

Crossmichael’s success in reaching the final is even more impressive in that the company boasts just 10 regular actors and had to draft in more. “When we saw the list of plays we’d have to do for the competition, we thought, ‘This is scary,’ ” admits McIntyre. “Then one member said his friend had just translated A Midsummer Night’s Dream into broad Scots, so we took a risk.

“Chances are nobody south of Carlisle understood what we were talking about, but we had a great time filming it in our leaky hut.”

Another amateur who caught the judges’ eyes was single mother of seven Janet Blizard from Greasby in the Wirral, a member of FissiParous Theatre Company, whose audition was from Chekhov’s The Bear. Blizard, an am-dram actor for 30 years, had originally planned to be a professional. “I got a place at college to study drama, but then I found out I was pregnant,” says Blizard, now in her early fifties.

“I don’t regret my children, but I do have some regrets about not having pursued acting.”

She hates the term “am-dram”. “Most people in community theatre do,” she says. “It’s such a derogatory term. Yes, there are companies with wonky sets and people getting lines wrong, but it’s unfair to lump us together.”

The star mentors were able to help for one day on each performance. Niamh Cusack, who occasionally coaches aspiring actors at the school of her teenage son, Calum, mentored Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group as they rehearsed The Cherry Orchard. “One actress needed to feel more free in herself, so I did something very simple and just got her running around the room,” says Cusack. “She didn’t know what I was getting at, but I think it put her in touch with the lighter feeling that was right for the character of Ranevskaya.”

All the professionals admit they were surprised at the high quality of amateur theatre, a leisure pursuit followed by roughly a quarter of a million people.

“This is just a way of getting people to say, ‘You know, I might go to a play now, because I’ve seen that people like me can do Shakespeare,’” says Harriet Walter, who was assigned to Glasgow’s Strathclyde Theatre Group. With luck, it may banish forever am-dram’s association with hammy theatrics as well.